Roger Ballen

Shadow Chamber

Roger Ballen has lived and worked in Johannesburg for some thirty years, photographing the inhabitants of isolated rural communities in South Africa, focusing on the strong, social statements he found in the people, animals and objects of a found physical and psychological environment.

With Shadow Chamber, Ballen moves into a surreal, metaphorical realm, away from the pictorial confines of documentary photography described as “the underbelly or ‘shadow chamber’ of existence.” Here, the boundaries of fact and fiction are blurred, and the photographic project morphs into powerful, yet disturbing psychological study.

Robert A Sobieszek writes of Shadow Chamber;
“To discern fact from fiction in this work may be simply impossible; to tell acting from real life may also be; to bother with such discernment may not be only futile but missing the point.”
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